The holy Qur'an says, "The Prophet is dearer to the ‘Momins' than their
own souls and his wives are their mothers." Since, in the words of Qur'an,
the wives of the Prophet are the mothers of the ‘Momins', it automatically
follows that the Prophet is their father. The Prophet says to ‘Ali, "O
‘Ali, I and you are the parents of the Momins". Most of the people knowing
that ‘Ali cannot be their mother in the literal sense of the word, are
carried away by their imagination and maintain that the Prophet has used
these words in an allegorical sense and not in the true sense of the word.

The fact is that the Prophet passed on the divine inspiration to ‘Ali
and deposited it with him with a view to produce through the depositor
and the depositee of the holy communication a religious body of men to
be remoulded and made fit for entry in the abode which is the goal of our
journey from this world. Had these people who explain these Traditions
according to their own whims known this they would have been able to distinguish
between a spiritual progeny and a physical progeny. But, they, in the words
of God, "are deprived of sense."

One should bear in mind that the connecting link between the father
and the son, which makes the latter stick to the former, is nothing but
a human seed. If a son sticks to his father because of this, a spiritual
son, the connecting link between whom and whose spiritual father is a ‘Kalma'
which is the extract of all the divine powers, should stick to spiritual
father a thousand times more. In this case the knowledge is the seed, the
tongue is the carrier of the seed and the human mind is the field for the
cultivation of this seed. This makes the difference between a man and lower
animal. There can no better seed than knowledge and there can be no better
field for the growth of this seed than the human mind.